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Celebrating our two-lane highways of yesteryear…And the joys of driving them today!

8. 1917 Monument Valley - The Mittens To Kayenta On The Monumental Highway


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I have copied below the original log for the route of the Motor Men of 1917 between The Mittens in Monument Valley and Kayenta. (See other posts in this series for earlier part of the trip.)

 

ARLogMittentKayenta1RS.jpg

 

ARLogMittentKayenta2RS.jpg

 

The map below provides an overview of the route between the Mittens and Kayenta. The video

provides quite a bit more detail. The purple road is my effort to identify their probably route and should be pretty close or right on the route. The blue lines are just connectors that don’t follow any actual roads today, and simply connect the more accurate purple roads.

 

ARMittensKayentaOverview.jpg

 

 

The trading post at Oljeto (or Oljato, which I will use as the most common modern spelling) was opened in 1906 by John Wetherill and his wife Louisa. Louisa learned Navajo and was very popular with them both at Oljato and Kayenta. The Wetherill family name is well known in the southwest. The Motor Men found the post abandoned in 1917. The Wetherills had moved the post to Kayenta in 1909. (The history of the current trading post at Oljato, which is on the National Register, dates back to 1924.)

 

“Among the traders who engaged in this commerce with the Navajo were Richard Wetherill's brother John, his wife Louisa Wade Wetherill, and their partner, Clyde Colville. In March 1906, they established a trading post near Oljato, Utah, after a feast John Wetherill prepared to assuage the fears of Old Hoskininni and his son Hoskininni-Begay, the acknowledged leaders of the Navajo people in the immediate area east of Navajo Mountain. From the door of their "jacal" home of posts and mud and adjacent one-room trading post, it was more than 150 roadless miles to the nearest railway stop in Gallup, New Mexico, and nearly as far to Flagstaff, Arizona. This enterprise was an outpost, far from any ties to industrial society.”

 

For the source of the quote above and more of the history of the area go to :

 

http://www.nps.gov/archive/nava/adhi/adhi2b.htm

 

The original trading post site is said to be one mile south of the current site. Until I learned this I couldn’t figure out how or why the Motor Men crossed Moonlight Wash to get to the Oljato Trading Post (37.024626° -110.316792°). It isn’t necessary to do that to reach the current (1924) site, but it was necessary to reach the then abandoned 1906 site.

 

It was helpful to fix the very “approximate” site (orange outline) of the original (1906) post because it also determines some of the route of the Motor Men. Travel to the 1906 site would have almost certainly been along the south side of the long butte shown on the video above.

 

But for the moment we are a bit ahead of our Motor Men. They are at The Mittens. As they head toward Oljato they pass a spring on the left at 49.0 and climb to a divide at 50.2 with a spectacular view. The route to the top of the divide is hard to fix, in part because there is no spring on any map I have seen, modern or vintage. There is a narrow and probably seasonal watercourse to the left at 49.0 and since the trip was made in May, that may have been the “spring.” If that is true, then they followed on or near the marked route to the divide. Otherwise they probably came up along the route of the modern road a little south. The divide is very evident, and provides the site for a lookout.

 

I haven’t tried to determine a most likely route across the featureless terrain between the divide and the beginning of the route along the south side of the large mesa. A little research turned up the fact that there was a wagon road between Chinle and Oljato noted in 1909 used for the Spencer Mine on the San Juan River, and for the reservation. It seems probably that that would be the road the Motor Men picked up to reach Oljato, and it had to be on, or within rifle shot, of the route I have marked in purple (south side of the mesa).

 

Leaving Oljato, the Motor Men of 1917 backtracked along the presumed wagon road and turned right (southeast) at a fork, very probably as shown on my map. However unless they could fly, they did not reach Kayenta in the mileages shown on the log. Where they zig zag’ed in and out of the wash is also a mystery, and irrelevant anyway as nothing would be left of the road today.

 

But they pass El Capitan at 94.7 and cross Laguna Creek at 101.2 (perhaps at 36.737001° -110.242334°) as they close in on Kayenta at 102.2. The terrain as they pass El Capitan constrains them to follow on or near the modern US163, but there appears to be an older crossing of Laguna Creek west of the modern road. I have placed their route along that alignment.

 

At Kayenta they meet the Wetherills (see first post in this series for picture).

 

Dave

 

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